


two penny moons

by meritmut



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Blood and Gore, Gen, Ghosts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-13
Updated: 2019-11-13
Packaged: 2021-01-30 08:15:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21425053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: The path was a circle, and it began and ended with blood.
Relationships: Knights of Ren & Kylo Ren
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16





	two penny moons

**Author's Note:**

> > shoves me oc's into the world before lucasfilm can murder 'em
> 
> > murders them meself

When the smoke cleared, the ones he had killed stood around him.

Göndul, pale-eyed and tattooed, leered out of the shadows, her features pulled into a rictus grin by the wound that clove her jaw almost in two. Beside her Skögul was methodically prodding her innards back into place, deft fingers slipping in the blood that still leaked darkly out.

Blood soaked his trembling hands, staining his nightclothes beyond hope of saving. He didn’t remember how it had got there. He didn’t remember anything.

Kylo squeezed his eyes shut. That wasn’t true. He remembered the green light, the bewilderment and the _terror_. After that—

After that, nothing, just the acrid burn of smoke in his lungs and a pain in his chest like a cold fist around his heart, the weight of it threatening to suffocate him. He’d lost consciousness, there in the dust, unheeding or uncaring if the fire found him.

The world was already burning—what did it matter if it took him too?

Better for all of them had it done so.

His head thundered like a herd of paralopes had rampaged through it. Sweat gathered at the nape of his neck, the stifling heat carried on the air that brought with it the stomach-churning reek of organic things burning. All around, the night was riven by the haunting sound of distant cries; the Force itself seemed to twist and writhe in torment.

Time slowed to a crawl.

Orphne lay as one sleeping, her slender form half-buried by the fallen stones nearby. Above her stood Sakhmes in silent vigil, seemingly unscathed—till Kylo noticed the severed wrist she gripped tightly in the opposite hand. She eyed the cauterised stump with disinterest, as if it was not hers; as if all of this were of no consequence, and when her gaze fell on him she regarded him the same way.

_Are you alive,_ he wanted to ask, but there was something lodged in his throat: some dense dark mass that reached out of the void inside him and choked the words with fingers of ice.

Through the fog swirling around in his head, he registered the sound of something heavy being dragged over the dirt.

Closer it came, until he could hear the uneven footsteps that accompanied it; until he thought he could perceive the direction whence it came, and turning his bowed head toward the sound Kylo opened his eyes just as Louhi emerged from the darkness.

Blood trickled from her mouth and from the wound that sheared across her chest, exposing the bones beneath to the soot-blackened air. When she smiled at him, her teeth were red.

He tried again to speak—he forced his lips to move but horror had stolen his voice. The thing that was not Louhi’s grin only widened.

They were all around him, now. He could feel them there as they had been in life, following him with a faith he had never deserved.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost, kid.”

The ruin of Macha’s face could not disguise the mocking edge to her voice. Kylo looked to her where she crouched in the dark a few yards away, picking her teeth out of the dust, and in the sightless hollows where her eyes should have been he found laughter.

“You didn’t think we’d leave you behind?”

“I thought you were dead.” The buzzing in his ears made it hard to know if his mouth obeyed his brain, but he persevered. “I thought I killed you.”

“Death is one path among many. What happens once may happen again.”

“And what happens twice will surely happen thrice.” With her sisters’ aid Orphne had risen to her feet and now she stood alongside them, watching him with sombre black eyes. “For some, life is meant to be walked alone.”

But I’m not alone, he thought. You’re with me.

Slowly, a murky grey light had begun to filter over the world. Dawn couldn't be far away; he had no idea how long he'd been unconscious but with every passing moment it seemed the dark grew less impenetrable, and the prospect of day's cold eye laying bare this nightmare flooded him with dread.

His heart had become a stone inside his chest. A terrible, devouring numbness spread out from it.

Louhi was moving, stooping close to extend her hand toward him. Her features flickered as she did so and for a split second Kylo was looking at the face of someone else.

“We’ll always be with you.” Her voice belonged to someone else, too: someone he knew. Someone he _had_ known.

Someone who had lain cold in the grave since the night he put her there.

Cold like Louhi’s skin when he slipped his hand into hers and let her haul him upright with a strength she could not possess. She lifted her free hand to rest it against his face, and it was only when her thumb smoothed over his cheek that he realised he was crying.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

Her eyes crinkled. “It isn’t your fault.”

Kylo wanted to believe her. Her voice was her own again, familiar and grave, and he had never known her to wilfully lie.

But when he closed his eyes he could still see the green light; he could hear the saber's muted drone as it split the night above his head. He doubted he would ever forget it.

“She is being kind,” scoffed Macha, who had never minced her words or held much patience for those who did.

Louhi raised one shoulder in a noncommittal shrug. “You loved us too much,” she said, as if that explained everything.

Maybe it did.

“This is what it means, to follow his path.” As ever, Sakhmes seemed to know what he was thinking. “You will be the end of everything you love.”

The cold was in his extremities, deadening his fingers even where Louhi held them. His free hand clenched into a fist at his side.

“I already was. I know that, now.”

The darkness had been in him from the start. The truth—that there was something broken in him, something so ruinous that even Vader’s children could not suffer him to live—had only given the monster its name.

_The monster._

It had only ever been him.

He knew that now; knew that to hope otherwise had been the blind foolishness of a child who still believed that the most frightening things came from the world's darkest corners, and not from within.

From the blood, rising up black as the earth under his knees: he saw it now with the unimpeachable clarity of a dreamer on the edge of waking—the curse borne in the bloodline, the ancient wound that had never healed; the thin dark thread like a slash of violent scarlet running through his life. The future had always seemed like an unknown, a lightless road unfolding scarcely further ahead than the eye could see before it fell away into nothing—a precipice with only fathomless void below. All his life he had walked blindly on without ever knowing where the path would end, the dark nipping at his heels with every step he believed he chased the light.

He saw now that the path was a circle, and it began and ended with blood.

The restless dead gathered around him seemed to affirm it.

They were all that remained to him now.

“Stay with me,” he croaked. Pleading with ghosts.

Louhi squeezed his hand.

“Always.”


End file.
